Bitter rivals Visa and Mastercard have struck a deal that lets each firm's digital wallet service request the other's tokenised payment credentials.
Introduced by Visa and MasterCard a couple of years ago, tokenisation replaces the traditional 16-digit account number with a unique series of numbers, helping to prevent exposure of sensitive consumer account information in online and mobile payments.
In an effort to drive the adoption of tokens, the competitors have now struck a deal in relation to their MasterCard Masterpass and Visa Checkout digital wallets.
The reciprocal agreement allows Visa to request tokenised Mastercard payment credentials from Mastercard for provisioning into Visa Checkout, and for Mastercard to request tokenised Visa credentials from Visa for provisioning into Masterpass.
The move means that the firms' wallets are open to each other's cards, a development designed to keep issuers, merchants and customers happy.
Says Mastercard: "By allowing each network’s respective wallet service to leverage the token solutions of the other network, this agreement will ensure that each network’s wallet solutions can continue to stay open - and can add the extra security of using tokens in place of real card numbers."